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NIH rules are supposed to stop ‘pass the harasser.’ In one recent case, they appear to have failed

Despite sending unwanted sexual emails and other “invasive” behavior, David Gilbert carried two NIH grants to a new institution and was awarded $2.5 million in new money

April 24, 2023

Science

By Meredith Wadman

"When genome researcher David Gilbert left Florida State University (FSU) in 2021 for the San Diego Biomedical Research Institute (SDBRI), he took two large National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants with him. The biomedical agency approved the transfer and went on to award Gilbert, a DNA replication expert who publishes in Science, Nature, and Cell, a new, $2.5 million grant last year.

None of this would be out of the ordinary—except that, in 2020, prior to any of these moves, FSU had completed a far-reaching investigation prompted when Gilbert emailed a description of his erotic dream to a graduate student."

How Do Scientists Perceive the Relationship Between Ethics and Science? A Pilot Study of Scientists’ Appeals to Values

April 25, 2023

SpringerLink

By Caleb L. Linville, Aiden C. Cairns, Tyler Garcia, Bill Bridges, Jonathan Herington, James T. Laverty, & Scott Tanona

"Efforts to promote responsible conduct of research (RCR) should take into consideration how scientists already conceptualize the relationship between ethics and science. In this study, we investigated how scientists relate ethics and science by analyzing the values expressed in interviews with fifteen science faculty members at a large midwestern university. We identified the values the scientists appealed to when discussing research ethics, how explicitly they related their values to ethics, and the relationships between the values they appealed to. We found that the scientists in our study appealed to epistemic and ethical values with about the same frequency, and much more often than any other type of value. We also found that they explicitly associated epistemic values with ethical values. Participants were more likely to describe epistemic and ethical values as supporting each other, rather than trading off with each other. This suggests that many scientists already have a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between ethics and science, which may be an important resource for RCR training interventions."